A Choice Movement We Can All Get Behind
President Trump has been trying to make school choice a priority for months. Now, with the virus forcing local districts to scrap their fall plans, he might finally have the opening he’s been waiting for.
President Trump has been trying to make school choice a priority for months. Now, with the virus forcing local districts to scrap their fall plans, he might finally have the opening he’s been waiting for.
After an aggressive push to get kids back in the classroom this September, the president — like a lot of leaders — has finally had to reckon with the grim realities of the pandemic. With almost every major district reverting back to virtual learning, the White House agreed Thursday that safety has to come first. “Our goal is to protect our teachers and students from the China virus while ensuring that families with high-risk factors can continue to participate from home.” But that doesn’t mean that Americans shouldn’t have options, he insisted. If families don’t want to fall into the same distance learning patterns of the spring, they shouldn’t have to.
“If schools do not reopen,” President Trump said during Thursday briefing, “the funding should go to parents to send their child to [the] public/private, charter, religious or home school of their choice. The keyword,” he emphasized, “being choice.” “If the school is closed, the money should follow the student so the parents and families are in control of their own decisions. So, we would like the money to go to the parents of the student. This way they can make the decision that’s best for them.”
That was music to the ears of a lot of parents, who are scrambling to find stable solutions for the fall that not only fits their schedules and their children’s needs — but that won’t cost more on top of the taxes they are paying to public education. Of course, Republicans have been trying for years to boost scholarships and tax credits for charter and private schools. Now, in one of the few silver linings of COVID, the virus is giving the administration and Congress an opportunity to get creative. Nothing, Republicans say, should be off the table. Families should be able to use the money for everything from education technology to supplementary curriculum and more.
Before the president even made his pitch, Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) were racing to get a bill called the School Choice Now Act on leaders’ desks. “Children in all K-12 schools, public and private, have been affected by COVID-19,” Alexander pointed out. “Many schools are choosing not to re-open and many schools are failing to provide high-quality distance learning. The students who will suffer from this experience the most are the children from lower income families. This bill will give families more options for their children’s education at a time that school is more important than ever.”
The proposal leans heavily on the Education Freedom Scholarships concept that the president mentioned in his State of the Union address. Considering the urgency of the situation, Scott and Alexander are proposing a one-time emergency cash infusion to each state. According to the senators, local leaders could direct the dollars as they see fit, and families would get direct financial assistance for private school tuition or homeschooling expenses.
The sooner the better, as far as private schools are concerned. At least 107 have been forced to permanently close their doors because of pandemic hardships. And that isn’t just bad news for suburban parents, but also the huge number of inner-city children they serve. That should bother liberals, who insist they care so much about minority communities. It doesn’t. Like so many of their phony crusades, the far-Left doesn’t actually want to lift kids out of poverty. If they did, they wouldn’t be suing the Department of Education for suggesting that faith-based schools should have some share of the virus relief funds.
Instead, the NAACP, along with the gangters at SPLC, would rather disenfranchise black and Hispanic families than give them alternatives to failing government schools. Like most liberals, they’re desperate to protect government education, which provides them a monopoly for the impressionable minds of children. Late last year, SPLC even launched a campaign to wipe out voucher programs — keeping low-income kids trapped in their dead-end schools and slamming the door on any chance of future success. (This is the same "social justice" group that tried to destroy the thriving charter school system in Jackson, Mississippi, where minority students were shattering state performance records.)
Hopefully, the Left’s war on school choice is going alienate them with a huge swathe of their base — who’s always been as enthusiastically supportive of the idea as conservatives. They need to understand, the Washington Post points out, this is a political winner for Trump. Most parents want options, and now is the time to do what Congress should have done a long time ago and give them some. Maybe, Forbes points out, the “School Choice Now Act could be a place where those from the Right and Left could come together… [and] meet the diverse needs of their communities. If that were the case, it would be a silver lining to the dark cloud of the [recession] and the virus that created it.”
Originally published here.
The RNC Goes Unconventional
Nothing about 2020 is normal — including, it turns out, the Republican National Convention. After weeks of trying to make the event work, the president surprised people on Thursday with the announcement that he was canceling the Jacksonville celebration. Worried about the spike in coronavirus cases, especially in Florida, President Trump decided “to have a big convention is not the right time. I have to protect the American people.”
Of course, the media, which for months has been bashing the president for even considering moving forward, was just as critical that he pulled the plug. “Reopen schools, but no GOP convention?" Politico jabbed. This, they insisted, "was a stunning reversal for an optics-obsessed president, who’d been so adamant about a massive convention that he moved it from Charlotte, N.C. to Florida to ensure it would happen.”
On the flip side, if the president had gone ahead and hosted the convention, he’d have been slammed as an irresponsible narcissist exposing thousands to coronavirus. He can’t win. As Tim Graham points out, just when you thought the media couldn’t hate a president more, “the coronavirus pandemic did what some might have thought was impossible: it made Trump coverage even more negative.” According Media Research Center, which tallied up all the evening news coverage on the major networks, it was 99.5 percent hostile to the president by May — an all-time low.
Meanwhile, MRC shakes its head, the media’s love fest with Joe Biden continues. “… ABC, CBS, and NBC could barely muster three minutes of airtime on how Biden told black voters that ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.’ NBC gave it a few seconds. ABC and CBS both rushed to ‘balance’ the story with negative Trump news. CBS showed Biden was leading among black voters, 90 percent to 3 percent.” Other scandals, gaffes, and missteps have either been explained away — or ignored altogether.
“This is not journalism,” Graham argues. “This is badly disguised campaign advertising.” But even the media may not be able to help Joe out of the mess he’s made of the Democratic platform. Things like socialism, infanticide, reparations, open borders, climate change, and gender-free bathrooms may play well at leftist fundraisers, but — as Hillary Clinton learned the hard way in 2016 — they’re a bust with everyday Americans. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine is so convinced that the Biden-Sanders platform will come back to haunt Democrats that she wrote, “Joe Biden signed the death warrant for his campaign last week, even if he doesn’t know it.”
“Well-meaning people might stick their fingers in their ears and vote for Biden out of nostalgia for a Democratic Party that no longer exists or out of exhaustion at the relentless anti-Trump barrage. But with his ‘Unity Task Forces’ document, Biden has proven only that he is an empty husk. Old Joe, who was for police and working people and law and order, is long gone. His body is there but, like his party, it has been invaded by the socialist Left.”
“… No matter how many New York Times columnists try to craft Biden an image as ‘working class Joe’ from Scranton, ‘a man who is not ideological,’ or dream up excuses for him not to debate President Trump, the charade is unsustainable.”
The mask has already slipped. And even Democrats are up in arms about how out of step their candidate is with mainstream America. In an open letter to the DNC platform committee, 115 faith leaders joined Democrats for Life in opposing the party’s wild extremism on an issue that most voters struggle to justify. “We urge the Democratic Party to embrace policies that protect both women and children: legal protection for pre-born children, improved prenatal care for women in need — especially women of color — alternatives to abortion, and a comprehensive culture of life free from violence, poverty, and racism. We call upon you to recognize the inviolable human dignity of the child, before and after birth. We urge you to reject a litmus test on pro-life people of faith seeking office in the Democratic Party.”
They call on Biden and the DNC to end their “explicit” support for taxpayer-funded abortion in America and overseas, “opposed by 60 percent and 76 percent of voters." Seventy-nine percent of voters, they point out, also oppose elective abortion on demand, including, but not limited to, many people of faith. "They deserve a home in the Democratic Party.”
Originally published here.
Lost and Founders: America’s Answers in the Past
Today’s Americans aren’t the first ones to wonder if our country has lost its way. Abraham Lincoln used to worry, when the generation of the founders had died out, that we’d lost the living memory we’d need to carry on their legacy. “I think we’re back there again,” Katharine Gorka says. And if this nation is going to survive, we need to take a trip down memory lane, she insists, and remind ourselves what made America what it is.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has spent a year doing that with his Commission on Unalienable Rights. Not surprisingly, the media is incensed at the idea, since a return to founding principles doesn’t lead to the Marxist revolution they’ve been hoping for. The fact of the matter, Katharine told Sarah Perry on “Washington Watch," is that the people who care about the real America are the new dissidents. "I’ve thought a lot about our pilgrim and separatist forefathers who came from England in the in the 1500s. When that movement was building up, people [in] the minority who didn’t like what was happening, they would have to gather in their houses. And they would study pamphlets and they would have intense conversations [about philosophy and religion]… And I feel like that’s where we are now.”
Those of us who understand the Framers’ ideals, who’ve had the benefit of a decent civics education, we need to share that knowledge, Gorka insists. “We need to go back to our founding documents and be reminded why America is the way it is.” Because right now, she says, two things are happening that are “equally destructive.” “The first is we are not teaching our founding anymore. Young Americans don’t understand what was so revolutionary in the thinking of the founders. I mean, the very idea that you create a nation built on an idea… not only that all men are created equal — that’s monumental in itself — but that we will govern ourselves. Those two things in particular [along with the] importance of natural rights, we’re not teaching. Kids don’t understand what was so special about America.”
And secondly, Katharine explains, “is the fact that we have replaced content-based civics with what’s called action civics. Our new civics are all about teaching kids to go out and protest…” But the research shows, she warns, “shows that the vast majority of the issues that kids are going out demonstrating for are progressive or partisan Leftist issues. And the problem is, it creates group think. People aren’t taught… the foundational ideas. They’re simply taught go out, be passionate about something, and demonstrate for it.”
But we’re in the middle of a transformative event in American education. And the opportunities we have with the coronavirus lay at our feet to change what kids are learning. “I think people are waking up,” Katharine says. “I think they realize that they’ve been complacent too long, and we’re paying the price for it now with the statues and the anarchy and the violence. [More parents] are going to take their kids’ education back into their own hands. And even where they’re not, because they don’t have the opportunity [to], I think they’re going to get a lot more engaged in what’s happening in schools because they’re seeing the results of the education our kids have been receiving.”
But we can’t stop with education, she argues. Every American who cares about this country needs “to step out of [their] comfort zone and go out and defend this republic. Because being on cruise control anymore is not going to work.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
